Whistleblower's identity revealed

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The whistleblower who alerted officers to the torture of Iraqi prisoners of war was Specialist Joseph Darby, 24.

Bernadette Darby, his wife of six years, said she didn't know about her husband's role until a reporter called her on Sunday, but it sounded like something he would do. "Whenever he knows something's wrong, he doesn't stand by it," she said.

Darby's name emerged this weekend in an article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, which detailed a report by Major-General Antonio Taguba in February that accused soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company of "sadistic" treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

The article said that Mr Darby saw photographs of naked prisoners and wrote an anonymous letter about the mistreatment, which he slipped under the investigators' door. He later gave a sworn statement.

"He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong," Special Agent Scott Bobeck, of the army's Criminal Investigation Command, said in a transcript of a military hearing quoted in The New Yorker.